The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  What about your father?

  He died when I was a child.

  She raised her head to look at him. I’m sorry. He stroked the black of her hair and she rested on him again.

  You should see it at harvest time. Then it is beautiful, all gold as far as you can see.

  Like in America? In the movies. Like where Dorothy comes from in The Wizard of Oz?

  No, not like America either. Like England, that’s all. There’s a farmhouse that’s been there almost as long as America’s been America, and a village and a church that have been there longer.

  Do you have photos?

  No photos. It’s not special. It’s just ordinary.

  She looked into his eyes again. Will you go back there when you leave Japan? Help your brother on the farm?

  No, I shouldn’t think so. It’s Richard’s thing, not mine.

  And it was your father’s thing.

  I suppose so. He didn’t grow up on a farm though. He came there after he left the army. He could have gone to university or something, but they said now that the war was over the farmers would be the heroes.

  That’s good.

  Was it good? I don’t know if it was good.

  Gently, he shifted her head from his chest and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He looked out of the window. A fine rain. Figures on the street beneath umbrellas. If he was alone he would have taken some pictures. Cartier-Bresson would have taken those pictures, the relationships between the umbrellas on the street and the spaces between them. He would have found the moment when the arrangement was perfect.

  When he came back with the coffee she had dropped off to sleep again. He put down the two mugs and took up the camera instead. He photographed her splayed across the futon with only a piece of the bedding on her and her legs dropping above the tatami floor. He photographed her little feet that hung as if they were dancing above their shadows on the mat, her head and shoulders emerging from the white of the sheet, her face with the black hair falling across it, her mouth cracked open, darkness like a whisper between her lips. The photographs would be very soft because he used no flash.

  Then he put the camera down, unsure of his right to take pictures of her like that while she slept. Her sleep made her closed to him, closed and apart, and he longed for her to wake. Yet when he put the camera down he did it gently, resting it on the cushioned black strap so that it did not make a noise to disturb her. He lay on his back on the futon beside her and closed his own eyes but did not sleep, his mind working over what, in a rush of openness, he wanted to tell her, what he might have told in that moment if only she had woken, lying beside him looking not at him but up to the neutrality of the ceiling, what would have opened him to her, sidelong, as he did not open to anyone; if she had not slept, if she had been able to see what he saw against the blankness; if, after all, she had not been Japanese. But she was soundly, innocently asleep, and she was Japanese, so how could he do anything other than keep it to himself?

  Home. The farmhouse a ramble of older beamed rooms behind a regular brick facade, the front rooms tall and light with their sash windows, those at the back dim with small leaded casements. Two staircases, one from the hall and one from the kitchen; another narrow dusty set of stairs leading to the attic. How do you describe that kind of house to a Japanese? The size and age of it; the extent of the farmyard, the old cowsheds and stables and barns in disrepair, Richard’s new barns beyond them. And then the land, in which the farm itself was the dominant feature, that and the village and the church a half-mile off across the fields.

  He wished that he did have pictures. Here is my house, he might have said, here is the garden where we used to play. Here my mother, my brother. No, he doesn’t look like me. He’s tall and fair. He looks more like my father. I take after my mother. Richard takes after my father, in temperament, people say, as well as looks. I suppose that’s true, if they say it – but I was so young, I have only a notion of him. Here is my room – yes, we each had our own rooms, the house is big, with bedrooms to spare. This is the view from my window – my window looked out the back across the farmyard to the fields. He would have shown her the pictures and tried to describe a childhood very different from that of a Japanese girl born in the same year in a suburb of Tokyo.

  When I woke in the mornings – I always woke early – I would go straight to the window and look out and see what was going on.

  There was more that he would have to tell her, if she was to understand, that could only be told and not shown in photographs. Because there was movement in it, and smell and sound, and continuity, the passing of time.

  * * *

  There was the work, that was a constant of the place. His father up and out often soon as it was light, the clank of machinery and engines starting up in the yard. The knowledge of his big and slightly stooped figure moving about, taking the tractor out, of the preoccupation that was a constant beneath his action, the thought of things past and things always about to be done. Then after his father was not there any more, the sound of contractors working the land, bringing in their own machines, so that the farm sound was outside-world noise, not belonging to the house; and now it belonged again, and there was Richard, a little later in his rising perhaps than their father had been, more systematic in his work, with the modern methods and the bigger machines that had made the new barns necessary.

  There was the growing-up of boys on a farm. The naturalness of it, the occasional hardness, his mother who must have come to the farm urban and soft seeming somehow separated in those days, before; indoors most of the time as she had not begun to do the garden then, telling them to take off their boots when they came in; having wanted, perhaps, some quite other life. There was so much they did that they did not tell her about, of which she would have disapproved or been afraid.

  There were the three of them, himself and Richard and their father. In the yard. Beside him riding on the tractor. The three of them walking out to scare the pigeons from the fields. Shouting in the fields, whirling round as small living scarecrows. Scaring the crows which their father said were cleverer than the pigeons as the crows would peck into the ground all along a line of drilled seed. Standing still beside their father in the spinney when he shot the pigeons as they came in to roost, very still because the pigeons would spot them if they made the slightest movement, watching the birds come, waiting until their father had his shot. And then when Richard was old enough to have the .410, standing envious of the gun and of the wonderful responsibility and the paternal attention that were acquired by carrying it.

  Boys, I need to tell you something.

  She gathered them on the sofa in the sitting room, placing herself at the centre, he on one side of her, Richard on the other. She would have put her arms around them but the dog came up and nosed against her knees so she narrowed and her hands went to the dog instead.

  Your father’s had an accident.

  Her touch only made the dog more restless.

  He tripped, she said, with his gun. He had been climbing a fence and he tripped, and the gun went off.

  Daddy shouldn’t have done that, Richard said. Richard had been taught the rules: how to carry a gun, how you don’t point it at anyone, how you don’t carry it loaded, how you break it before you climb a fence.

  Out After Dawn

  He didn’t say anything. His brother spoke but he did not speak. He did not speak because he had seen. So had the dog, which turned its head to him now, a retriever with brown pools of eyes and a slobbery mouth and pink tongue. The dog nuzzled into his lap, and he bent over and buried his head in its smelly golden coat. The dog had seen and whined over the form of the man on the ground, which was a form that was to be recognised by the clothing and the build and the hands but not by the head that was no longer a head but had fallen back into a heap of leaves, smearing with red the winter’s wet leaves that were turning from copper to black as they lay. Coming between the trees the boy saw the dog and the man, and the shotgu
n which the man had clasped to him. He saw it only for an instant and ran away.

  He ran back the way that he had come.

  He ran back, and from that moment it all went in reverse. If only it could have been reversed, all of it, rolled back and rerun some other way.

  He had come from the house. He had heard his father going out the back door. From his window he had seen his father walking out into the grey of the yard, with the dog beside him and his coat on and his tweed cap, and the gun under his arm. Everyone else was asleep. Richard was asleep in the next room. He had dressed quickly and gone down the back stairs, quietly so that he didn’t wake them, and put on his own coat and went out too. If he ran, he might catch up. If he caught up, he would be walking in that still time after dawn, just himself with his father and the dog. So he had run the way that he thought that his father and the dog had gone, but he couldn’t see them any more because of the fog. He had run out after them into the fog, across the paddock and then across the plough which was frosted and hard going. It was when he was halfway across the plough that he had heard the shot – and now when he was halfway back he heard a man shouting. Someone else had been out that morning, Billy Eastmond from the village gone to check his traps. Billy had rabbit traps on the Six Acre. He also would have heard the shot and wondered who was shooting in the fog.

  It was Billy Eastmond who brought the dog and the news home.

  She woke a second time and opened her eyes to see him. He was aware of her eyes on him. It was brighter now. The rain must have stopped and the sky cleared.

  She was curled and warm with the sleep. She put out her hand to him where he lay so straight. Hello.

  Hi.

  What is it? Why do you stare at the ceiling like that?It was just an ordinary wooden ceiling, directly above them the standard square light fitting made of paper and bamboo with a cord that could be pulled once or twice for different levels of light.

  When he didn’t turn his head her finger travelled all the way down his profile, down his forehead and his nose – his English nose, she said it was, though he didn’t know what made a nose English – to his lips and over the turn of his chin.

  What time is it?

  Don’t know. Must be late.

  It’s not raining.

  No.

  Let’s get up and go to the park.

  He made coffee again and they ate some toast which was all there was.

  Which park? he asked. This one here?

  No. A big park. Shinjuku Gyoen.

  He took a picture of her on the way, in the street; another on the station platform when they were waiting for the train, her smile and the bright red raincoat making her stand out against the crowd. Why did you take that picture? she asked, and he said that he always took pictures in the stations. He planned a series of them: a particular view of Tokyo, the platforms, the tunnels, the ticket halls, the underground malls. Tokyo underground, she said. Yes, he said, that’s right.

  Then he took a picture of her in the train.

  Is that for your series?

  Wait and see.

  Kumiko in the park, on the bridge above the lake, with her back to the trunk of a pine and the lake behind her, in front of a pavilion, beside a stone lantern, doing a star jump in the lime avenue in the French garden – big grin, legs wide, arms out in a line from her shoulders. He recorded so many instants of that day. But he was only doing what others did. Taking pictures was one of the things that Japanese couples did on Sundays in the park.

  The next day when he saw her at work she was the girl with whom he had spent the weekend but she was also someone else. She was at the desk in reception, typing. She couldn’t keep the smile out of her face and she seemed to be making a lot of mistakes, stopping her typing to white them out, reaching forward so that hair hung over the machine, tongue touched to her lips.

  She was wearing crazy clothes, a miniskirt with a zigzag pattern on it.

  I like what you’re wearing today.

  It’s Monday. You have to be positive on Mondays. There’s a whole five days to get through before the weekend.

  That’s true.

  Shall we go somewhere this weekend?

  How about tonight?

  I can’t do tonight.

  Tomorrow night?

  She shook her head. Too busy.

  Wednesday then? The weekend seemed too far off.

  Richard

  It must have been sometime later that winter, maybe days later, maybe weeks, he doesn’t know. A quiet moment, Richard not threatening this time. They were alone, by the tree in the garden that they used to climb, where their father had put a rope so that they could get up to the first branch. It could not have been a very wintry day because they were out climbing the tree.

  I know you were there. You saw.

  Where?

  Tell me what happened.

  I didn’t see anything happen.

  Richard didn’t understand that what he said was true. He was there but he was late, and nothing happened when he was there. It was over. He was behind the action, crossing the bare field, walking into the aftermath of action and not into the action itself so that the action would never be explained. He could no more say how it happened than he could have made it not-happen.

  When he got there, things were still. Fixed. Silent. There wasn’t even a bird in the spinney, nothing rustling. The birds would have flown away with the shot. There wasn’t a bird nor a fly nor anything else that moved. There was only the dew, glistening, and where there wasn’t dew there was the red stain seeping from the leaves onto the soil, and the soil blotting it up.

  4

  Summer

  The pictures of summer have deep shadow in them as well as light. The brown shadow that draws the eye to it from the heat, from the gold of tatami in sunlight or from the green of bamboos or the blue of the sky. The black shade beneath the dark branches of pines. The charcoal shade beneath a roof. The crisp double-barred outline of a torii thrown onto the ground before a shrine. There are fewer pictures of the streets. Too bright they are, too hard and hot to contemplate, the walls of glass and concrete, the girls bare-armed and bare-legged, the men removing their jackets, black and white in the sunlight.

  In his pictures of the underground, neither the light nor the scene changes, but only the clothes – the skimpiness of them and the brighter range of colour, and perhaps a fatigue that shows on men’s and women’s faces as they come down from the stifling city above.

  It had become the hot Japan that he had used to imagine before he came there, hot and humid. It was the humidity that made the days so heavy, the same humidity that kept the leaves in the gardens outside his window so glossy green, that hung in the air and held the pollution low over the streets and closed off the sky. It made time slow. The sound of the wind chimes seemed to slow and die. The sound of the neighbours seemed no more than a rustle, all the sounds of the city distant and dulled. Some of his students went away, and his lessons reduced so that he had more of the day to himself, though he didn’t use it to go out and take more pictures but too often stayed home in the flat in Inokashira, turning the fan up high and looking through whatever work he had developed, wondering if it would amount to anything. In the evenings if he did not see Kumiko he went to his regular bar and drank from his bottle there in the Japanese style, in a long glass with a quantity of crushed ice and cool water, smoking white-tipped Mild Sevens one after the other, topping up the glass so that it never emptied and stirring to see the dark gold of the whisky pale as it mixed. When he left the bar the night would still be sultry, black beyond the lights and lanterns of the street, but soothing like a black river taking him home, out of the entertainment district and through the park, over the lake, past the place where a bullfrog croaked, where each time he passed the bullfrog surprised him, even when he had come to anticipate it, and each time he thought again how comical it was that a frog should make such a bovine noise, that stood out against the background of the cicadas
which seemed as much a part of the night as the darkness.

  He slept heavily at first those nights, and then he would wake and throw the sheet off him, and lie and feel for the air coming off the fan. Or get up and drink a glass of water.

  On the nights when she stayed with him it was too hot to sleep close. They made love and then they separated, and each knew the hot length of the other spread alongside though their bodies no longer touched.

  This was how I used to think Japan would be, he said to her, from when I first heard of it, when I was a child. He had heard the word Japan and he had pictured a hot place, and nothing that he had learned about it since had altered that childhood expectation, not even the coming there and finding it cold.

  And is England cold and rainy like I think it is?

  Only some of the time.

  There was a pause. His thoughts ran against the whirr of the fan. It was because of his father, he thought. Some mistaken childish logic. His father had fought the Japanese, in the war. He knew that because his mother had told him. His father did not speak of it but his mother had told him, later. His father had fought a dreadful war in the jungle – not in Japan of course, his father had fought in India, Assam, Burma, not Japan, but that did not matter to a boy. His mother said that he never got over it. He fought the Japanese in the jungle. The jungle was hot. Japan was a hot place.

  Nowhere’s quite like you picture it, he said, his voice spinning away into the darkness and the whirr of the fan.

  Did she hear that, or was she already asleep? He felt a calm in the room, a sense that he was awake alone.

  * * *

  And her grandfather must have fought on the other side; his father young, just out of school, her grandfather a much older man.

  And here were the two of them lying just so much apart beneath the fan.

  He thought of the old man tending his bonsai, watering and feeding, training and pruning each one of his trees with exquisite care, removing the plants from their pots when the time came and pruning the roots, controlling the growth that could not be seen under the soil as much as the growth above. He thought of him bent in his brown kimono, the wrinkled skin on his bony turtle head, the precision of his hands and the wandering of his mind.